Editorial: Success for the ACA

Wednesday

Apr 2, 2014 at 11:14 PMApr 3, 2014 at 7:39 AM

The opposition to the Affordable Care Act began predicting its failure long before the law was written and narrowly approved by Congress. While Republicans used to acknowledge the need to improve Americans’ access to affordable health care, once it became President Obama’s top priority, their position had congealed to one of total rejection of all means of achieving it.They not only predicted failure, they hoped and prayed for it – and did everything possible to make certain it failed. And long before the ACA went into effect, they declared it a failure. Time and time again, they were proven wrong.They said the Supreme Court would declare the ACA unconstitutional, but the Roberts court upheld it.They said the ACA would destroy the economy, but the economy is slowly gaining steam. They said the website was a failure, but after a rough start, the website was fixed.They said millions of people were "losing their insurance," but it turns out many of their horror stories were exaggerated at best. People’s insurance options changed – as they do every year – but thanks in part to the ACA’s subsidies, many people ended up with a better deal than before.They said the administration would never make its goal of 7 million enrolled through new insurance marketplaces by Monday’s deadline. But, to almost everyone’s surprise, 7.1 million people have signed up.Definitive numbers are difficult at this stage, but if you add the expansion of Medicaid, the under-26ers on their parents’ policies, the children added to the CHIP rolls and the people with pre-existing conditions in new high-risk pools, perhaps 10 million people have obtained health insurance through the ACA.You might say the ACA has failed an estimated 5 million low-income individuals in 24 states where Republican governors, empowered by the Supreme Court, refused to participate in the federally-funded Medicaid expansion. That failure came from state capitals, not the White House.We won’t argue that the ACA is an unqualified success. It has hurdles still to clear, some of them the implementation of mandates that have been postponed through dubious executive actions.It will be months or years before we know whether critical goals of expanded coverage and cost restraints have been reached. We don’t know yet whether, once the dust has settled and people have their new or newly-revised policies, what percentage will consider themselves better off, worse off, or untouched by Obamacare.Republicans of late have been declaring the ACA a failure because polls show it is unpopular, but that’s a problem of marketing, not substance. And even that may be changing, with a Washington Post/ABC News poll this week registering 49 percent approval, a new high-water mark for the much-derided program.Time will tell how much success the Affordable Care Act has achieved. But for millions of people, it is anything but a failure.